Via hbdchick and SyFy: the AD 1257 climate downturn. This has been pinpointed to the Samalas volcano in the Lombok island of Indonesia. The event is recorded in the Babad Lombok compiled in the 1500s. Also Babad Suwung.
Lombok was, as hinted, literate - in Javanese. Its capital was Pamatan.
Unsure why we are reading about this again eight years later, but I'll not knock it: SyFy is giving us a checkpoint, as we needed for Late-Antique Ilopango. Unlike Ilopango, the date remains secure. And so does the effect - 4.43 cubic kilometers of pumice. VEI 7.
Pamatan remains undiscovered. I should love to see its library: records of thirteenth-century comets? early explorations of Australia? ... ethnography of the last Denisovans?
On the minus side, some of those ancient Javanese records currently thought to refer to the sixth century might be tampered, by copyists active in the thirteenth.
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